Howdy!
I've been kicking around a Bigfoot related project for some time now. Every now and then, the idea creeps back up, but it's a more involved idea than something I want to tackle by myself. It's a proper collaboration that is in its infancy right now.
Having entered the second month of my 4-5 month sabbatical from working, I got bit by the Bigfoot bug again. It felt like it could be a test run for the larger, more involved idea even though the two are completely unrelated outside of the subject. Why limit yourself to one bipedal ape man?
This was scratching an itch to do some frame by frame animation where I'd draw by hand. It's something I've done more of recently thanks to an experimental curious manager who I worked with at 2 companies, a crowd sourced animation project (Our Frasier Remake), and more hand drawn animation creeping into my GIF projects. That said, I've done very little hand drawn character focused work since college.
My reference and inspiration for this was the classic, iconic 1967 Patterson-Gimlin film. (You know the one.) I initially thought I'd do some rotoscoping to get the general movement and then add in the extras once the base felt right. After all I wanted this to be a quick project and that seemed the most economical approach.
This idea quickly fell apart on account of how difficult the P-G film is to make sense of when broken down on a micro level. It appears seamless as a whole, but once you get into the individual frames you're reminded that this was a film made with a rented camera in 1967 and most of the frames are nebulous blurs lacking definition and clarity. Add in how toward the end, Patty is mostly obscured by debris in Bluff Creek Canyon, and you realize that there are a lot more gaps that you have to fill in. All of this amounted to using it as a much looser base for reference where I grabbed the clearest frames of the key poses to use as my base.
I went through 2 rough passes, one extremely rough, and one more refined with each limb and section of body done in a different color to get more sense of anatomy. Once I had a rough that I was happy with, that felt good, I animated a camera shake. Here we threw away the Patterson-Gimlin film and just went with what felt like you were stumbling upon a Bigfoot in a clearing.
The wave was originally a little shy, not brash or over the top. I liked it, but it was a little too habituated. This Bigfoot has been around a lot of people and is over it.
Because of the quick zoom in, I needed the wave to be more bombastic. This Bigfoot knows he's been spotted and he's very into it.
The original background illustration
The background design was the biggest visual divergence from the Patterson-Gimlin film, while maintaining some call backs to it. Their film was shot right after a flood felled a number of trees, but the creek bed was dry, resulting in a lot of debris and a feeling of being extremely out in the open.
I wanted my Bigfoot a bit more hidden, a little more inconspicuous. I imagined the scene more lush with deeper, greener foliage that Bigfoot could hide in and out of.
The background broken up into the deep background and the foreground elements. Painted in Procreate.
Throw in some jaunty honky tonk stock music and you're good to go! This Bigfoot most definitely whistles while he goes about his day in Northern California.